Top 6 Benefits for “Understanding Others” Acumen Capacity Index™ Series

Acumen Capacity Index™ Series – Understanding Others

Today we continue our discussion on Acumen Capacity in the protection industry series. In this article, we will focus on the first of six dimensions “Understanding Others”. This is a critical aspect of assessing your specialist for assignments and matching to the principal’s needs. It sounds like a simple concept, yet a large number of professionals either cannot or choose not to develop their ability to understand others. The definition for “Understanding Others” is the individual’s ability to identify uniqueness and individuality in others around them. The goal for understanding your specialist’s level of clarity and bias on this is to provide you the insight to align your specialist with the assignments needs. This results in overall improved client experience.

Top 6 Benefits for “Understanding Others”

1. Clearly Understanding People

2. Ability to adapt to different people

3. Perceiving the needs of others

4. Ability to see things from a people perspective

5. Ability to appreciate others

6. Ability to apply understanding of people

Each of these show up in different ways for your organization, your client, and principal themselves. If we think about the day to day tasks and responsibilities associated with protection details you certainly can recall situations where these helped or hurt the assignment. This can range from a specialist who is unable to be flexible and adapt to the strong behavior style of a principal in one assignment to the extremely detailed behavior of the next.

You might even think about a prior situation where you had multiple specialists on an assignment and not everyone was able to work together. You may have that one person who the rest of the team does not like working with or can’t get along with no matter what you have tried.

When one team member does not see the value in his or her teammates and is disengaged it can be a distraction to the entire team putting the principal at risk. When the team has high clarity in understanding others they have the ability to connect easier and work more cohesively as a unit. This results in successful assignments, happy clients, happy principal, and even happy specialists who conducted the assignment.

Let’s take a look at a very common scenario for executive protection specialists.

Does this scenario sound familiar?

Your specialist is on assignment with the principal. During the assignment, the principal changes the plans. The principal decides they want to visit a restaurant, nightclub, or some other event. The specialist is now being asked to make it happen.

The specialist’s ability to understand people and connect with others is critical to achieving this goal. This might be the manager at a restaurant or club that you need to influence to get your principal into the location or get a reservation short notice. This may include the ability to build rapport with local security or law enforcement to park in a specific area for your principal not normally allowed.

Those with strong clarity in this area will successfully navigate this situation and result in a positive client and principal experience. Those with low clarity will likely fail and result in a negative client experience and possibly lose the client. Granted this request by the principal may or may not be part of the original scope of work. However, it is now being asked of them and the specialist’s ability to successfully navigate this request is essential.

Let’s take a little deeper look into this dimension of Acumen Capacity™.

The Understanding Others dimension is evaluated in two ways first is the clarity and second the individual’s bias. The clarity tells us how well the individual understands the uniqueness of others and connects with people. Bias provides additional insights into the individuals world- and self-views. Does the individual have the capacity to see the other person’s perspective?

Psychologist Sherri Campbell shared with Entrepreneur.com “Success in life and business boils down to effective interactions, humility, self-awareness and the all-important skill of perspective taking. These elements are the keys to success of any kind” (Campbell, 2016)

Works Cited

Al is a professional consultant with certifications in analysis of Behaviors, Driving Forces, Competencies, Hartman Acumen Capacity Index, Emotional Intelligence, and a Certified Professional Career Coach. He specializes in job benchmarking and talent selection along with other consulting services.
He is currently completing doctoral work for his PhD in Industrial & Organizational Psychology.
Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology is the scientific study of working and the application of that science to workplace issues facing individuals, teams, and organizations. The scientific method is applied to investigate issues of critical relevance to individuals, businesses, and society
Al has 20 years’ experience in leadership, business, retail, loss prevention and the security industry. This experience and academic training provides a unique perspective when working with clients in the security industry.